Monthly Archives: June 2018

Lee’s second novel is a multi-generational saga of a Korean family, beginning in the early 20th century in a tiny village in Yeong-do and stretching through Tokyo and Yokohama to the present, following one family through this tumultuous time in Korean history.

It starts with the arranged marriage of Hoonie, a good-hearted man who is disfigured by a cleft palate and club foot, to a much younger Yangjin and the birth of their daughter Sunja. While selling her mother’s kimchi at the market, the naive adolescent Sunja meets Hansu, a rich and powerful older man. Only later does she hear the rumors that he is a gangster.

With a sense of foreboding, we know what will happen next, but Lee makes these characters so individual, so particularly themselves that their story, however often told, feels new. Sunja’s stoicism, Hansu’s integrity and loneliness keep them from being stereotypes.

I felt this push-pull throughout the novel. Knowing the broad historical outlines often brought on that sense of foreboding. When Sunja and her husband Isak move to Japan to live with his brother, I knew—as they did not—the kind of discrimination they would face. I cringed in a later section when the brother decides near the end of the war to go to Nagasaki to work.

Yet the story engages your mind and heart right up to the end. It’s hard for a writer to find the right balance of having bad things happen to your characters and good things. Some experts say you cannot give them too many trials; after all, that’s what keeps us reading: to see how they will rise (or not) to each challenge. Yet as a reader I know how easy it is for me to suffer compassion fatigue. Lee finds the right pacing of successes and failures.

What I love about these multi-generational historical novels is the broad sweep of time, the chance to see choices played out in the lives of children and grandchildren, personal choices and historical events. However, this sweep is also a drawback. Moving between characters and across time as we do, we never really stay long enough with any one person to become as deeply invested in their story as we do in a story with a single protagonist.

This book starts slowly, with lots of narrative. I nervously fingered the bulk of remaining pages—485—and worried that I’d be too bored to finish it, even though it was my book club’s pick for the month.

Finally at the end of Chapter 2 we get a full scene when Isak arrives at Yangjin’s boarding house. As though released from the starting gate, the story takes off from there and held my interest for the rest of the book. What makes the difference is the good mix of dramatic scenes and minimal narration from then on.

As writers we are advised to start when something happens to begin the story—here, Isak’s arrival—so I would probably have chosen to begin there and fill in the previous information as flashbacks scattered through the present of the story.

However, in mitigation, I have to add that the first sentence–every writer’s bête noir–is magnificent. “History has failed us, but no matter,” Lee tells us, encapsulating the entire saga and what we will come to love about the characters.

I’m terrible at coming up with titles. Here, the pachinko game—a popular Japanese form of pinball that is peculiarly addictive—is a perfect metaphor for the capricious blows of fate and the stoicism of simply going on that mark these lives.

The trajectories of the pachinko balls are confined within the box of the machine itself, reflecting another aspect of this story. Much of the tension comes from the characters being constrained by society’s customs and politics. For example, in today’s culture Sunja’s pregnancy might not be the catastrophe that changes her life; without the privations and dangers of rebellions and wars Isak and his brother might continue to prosper; as Koreans in Japan Sunja’s sons might actually be able to find work other than in pachinko parlors.

I’ve always rebelled against society’s constraints, throwing myself into the counter-culture in the 1960s, then the women’s movement, single parenthood, a career in a male-dominated field. But this story make me realise that the ability to do so in relative safety is proof of my privilege.

What novel have you read set in Korea or helping you understand Korean history or culture?

Gomez’s book, part of the Rattle Chapbook Series, grew out of her experiences teaching poetry in Salina Valley State Prison. These are strong poems, often with a twist at the end that pierces your preconceptions.

I was blown away by the title poem, which describes an incident she must have heard about. She enters into it, using strong verbs to detail the happenings and poignant images to rend the heart.

Some poems seem based on observation, such as “Growing Apples” where inmates are excited about a volunteer: a seedling that sprouted “in a crack of damp concrete”. They transplant it to a paper cup and visit it throughout the day, stunned by this small miracle. There is no need to articulate what this struggling new life means to them, what promise of grace it holds; we can tell. What a beautiful moment to capture!

Other poems draw power from her imaginative entry into the inmates’ lives. In one poem, she describes Lorenzo weaving dream catchers for his fellow inmates out of pillow feathers, paper napkins, dental floss, memories and sounds. The specifics, such as his memory of waking to the sound of his grandmother’s canary, draw us in and help us feel the satisfaction of being absorbed in creative work.

The first of two prose pieces, “How Poetry Saved My Life: Part One”, describes arriving at the prison and the humiliating scrutiny by the guards at the checkpoints. This is perhaps my strongest memory of teaching in a prison myself, and she captures it both vividly and accurately. She goes on to recount poignant moments when men in the safe space afforded by her class are able to drop their prison machismo and show tenderness and concern for each other.

In Part Two, Gomez tells further stories of the changes wrought by poetry in the lives of these men and their appreciation. One man, Manuel, says, “‘I want to share this with my children.’”

Unfortunately, these prose pieces are also the least successful part of the book. It seems to me presumptuous to talk of poetry saving your life because it helped you heal from the shame of participating in reality television, when at the same time you are working with men who know firsthand and experience every day many very real threats to their emotional and physical lives.

Still, given its slender size, this collection is powerful, its images ones I will not soon forget. It is important, too, for the way it helps those who have not been inside a prison recognise the humanity and potential of those behind bars. And Gomez makes a strong case for the uses of poetry, not just for prisoners but for all of us.

In any communication there is a sender, a transference medium, and a recipient. When you whisper a secret to a friend, you are the speaker; the medium is the vibration in the air; and your friend is the recipient. For writers, our medium is our written work and our readers the recipients.

Each of these three components affects the content and quality of the communication. In the various discussion groups and critique sessions in which I’ve participated, I’ve been continually impressed by the different interpretations that readers may bring to the same poem or story based on their personal experiences and associations.

For me, reading Jane Kenyon’s poems for the first time has been like falling in love, that moment when you meet someone who seems to be your soulmate, who speaks your language, who knows what you have been through. I recently moved to a different part of the country after spending most of my life in one place. This early poem, about her move to New Hampshire, made me lose my heart to Kenyon’s work.

Here

You always belonged here.
You were theirs, certain as a rock.
I’m the one who worries
if I fit in with the furniture
and the landscape.

But I “follow too much
the devices and desires of my own heart.”

Already the curves in the road
are familiar to me, and the mountain
in all kinds of light,
treating all people the same.
And when I come over the hill,
I see the house, with its generous
and firm proportions, smoke
rising gaily from the chimney.

I feel my life start up again
like a cutting when it grows
the first pale and tentative
root hair in a glass of water.

The initial uncertainty, the gradual familiarisation, the stunning final image: all of these are true to my experience. And as Adrienne Rich so beautifully said in her poem “Planetarium”, the poet “translate(s) pulsations / into images for the relief of the body / and the reconstruction of the mind.”

This book is like a time capsule, holding Kenyon’s intense communiqués. Some read like prayers, some like a succession of images, inviting us to bring our own interpretations. She writes of love and light and herons and wasps, of depression and death and the things that survive or don’t.

Although the language seems simple, it is carefully crafted. An allusion here, a descriptive detail there, internal rhymes and repetition all work to create the music of these works.

One poem that intrigued me is “Briefly It Enters, And Briefly Speaks”. It is a list poem, almost a series of haiku, each starting with “I am”. It begins:

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . .

In trying to understand how this succession of images works as a coherent whole, I discovered subtle transitions: a starving girl to food on a plate to water filling a pitcher to a dry garden to a stone doorstep and inside a “heart contracted by joy. . . .”

I’m grateful to have found this treasure chest of poems that speak to me so clearly and illuminate my heart and give voice to my cares and celebrations. The speaker, the writer, may be gone but she has left us these gems to carry her voice to our ears.

Is there a poet or songwriter you’ve discovered recently whose work seems to speak to you?

With this novel, Mosley takes us on a different sort of journey. It’s a standalone novel, not part of one of Mosley’s mystery series. Here we are lured into the mind of ninety-one-year-old Ptolemy Grey, a mind that is fraying at the edges.

Ptolemy lives by himself, surrounded by piles of newspapers and boxes, listening simultaneously to classical radio and television news. He relies on his grandnephew Reggie to take him to the bank and grocery, afraid to go out by himself or answer the door to anyone but Reggie ever since a large drug addict named Melinda began terrorising him and stealing his money. Physically frail, he also forgets things that have just happened or been said, finding his mind wandering back to people and incidents from his childhood.

When Reggie is killed (not a spoiler; we learn this in the first few pages), his place is taken by Robyn, a teenager who has been living with Ptolemy’s grandniece, who took Robyn in when her mother died. At first Robyn visits, accompanying him on errands, but appalled by the state of his apartment, she begins cleaning and clearing. Gradually the old man and lonely girl become friends.

Mosley captures the constant threats to an attractive young woman. Even before the stories that have come out through the #MeToo movement, Mosley shows how men assume they have a right to come on to Robyn and become angry when she rejects their advances. The girl carries a knife for protection and isn’t afraid to use it.

But this is Ptolemy’s story. There’s something he still has to do, an unfulfilled mission dating from his childhood. Buoyed by Robyn’s care and companionship, he’s willing to take terrible risks to accomplish it.

The book is a fascinating exercise in deep point of view (POV), also known as free indirect discourse. Most of us learned in school the difference between first- (I), second- (you) and third- (he, she, it) person POV, and omniscient POV.

As I mentioned in the blog post about James Woods’s How Fiction Works, there are variations of third-person POV. Deep POV takes the reader completely into the protagonist’s world, not just being told only what they see, hear, etc., but actually experiencing everything directly, as though you are inside the character’s mind.

Of course, this can get a bit suffocating. The trick is to move between levels, like a camera coming in for a closeup or pulling back for a long shot, without giving the reader whiplash.

Mosley accomplishes this gracefully. Looking at the first scene, we begin with a distant third-person, with the protagonist simply “the old man” answering the phone. On the second page we move in a little closer, getting some of his thoughts: “He was certainly there, on the other end of the line, but who was it? the old man wondered.” Then a few paragraphs later we move fully into his mind, with no “reporting words” as a tag, before moving out again:

Was the voice coming from the radio or the TV? No. It was in his ear. The telephone—

“Who is this?” Ptolemy Grey asked, remembering that he was having a phone conversation.

Mosley continues this dance, effortlessly moving in and out of the old man’s mind, never losing the reader, and making it all seem the most natural thing in the world.

Another aspect of this book that I appreciated is the way Mosley handles descriptions of new characters as he introduces them. As I mentioned in a blog post of one of his other books, he often gives a little physical description with some telling detail. Here are a bank teller and a man who runs a gym:

She was a dark-skinned black woman with bronze hair and golden jewelry around her neck and wrists and on at least three fingers.

The man who asked the question was on the short side but he had extraordinarily broad shoulders and muscles that stretched his T-shirt in every direction. His face was light brown and his neck exhibited the strain of a man pulling a heavy weight up by a long rope.

Mosley sometimes combines the description with action.

Big, copper-brown, and buxom Hilda “Niecie” Brown folded the frail old man in a powerful but cushioned embrace.

A high-yellow woman was slumped across the blue sheets of the bed, crying, crying.

“How are you, my friend?” the old, ecru-skinned Middle Easterner asked. He took one of Ptolemy’s big hands in both of his, smiling and nodding as he did so.

Sometimes he lets imagery do much of the work, saying of the woman who would become Ptolemy’s beloved second wife: “Her yellow dress made its own party”.

Mosley’s novels are always entertaining, but for me as a writer they are also a masterclass in writing craft.